What I Learned from Ryan Lizza This Morning

1. Manly Men win elections.
  a.  Swearing and missing body parts are characteristics of a Manly Man.

2. The 2006 elections results were  "milestones" because they marked the return of Manly Men to the Democratic Party.

3.  Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emmuel make Lizza's nipples hard and they know how to find Manly Men.

4.  Howard Dean, Tammy Duckworth and Paul Hackett don't exist.

5.  Obama and Hillary are NOT Manly Men

6. If a party runs Manly Men, there is a danger that women will not vote for them because girls like babies and pearls and Manly Men like football, muscles and wars.

7. The opinions of two populist freshman Senators are worth those of one unelected, establishment, DLC strategist. (James Carville).

8. Manly Men are the salvation and ruination of the party's hopes in 2008.   

You can get a much more cohesive look at the real issue of the 2006 "Fightin' Dems" here.   For example: (50-State emphasis mine)

As one sign of where the interests are vested this year, the Republican National Committee did not tally up the number of Republican veteran challengers nationwide, nor did any conservative activist group, preferring instead to pooh-pooh Democratic touting of veterans as a political ploy. The number, I surmised, is somewhere between two and three-dozen. That’s smaller than the cadre of 57 Democratic military vets, but then, this was a purely defensive year for Republicans in which incumbent protection was deemed paramount and the recruitment of desirable newcomers was all but ignored. Democrats, by contrast, were on the offensive almost everywhere with new blood.

...

So, it seems that the Democratic Party sensed a need for an alternative to President Bush’s Iraq message and found a large part of it in the “fighting” image provided by military-vet candidates. A number of these candidates had already declared themselves at the grassroots level. The media was looking for such a trend, sensing public discontent over Iraq in polls and wanting to cover the story aggressively. Democrats knew that they could help narrow what was left of the national security perception gap between themselves and Republicans (they didn’t need to, it turns out: Because of Iraq, the gap had already narrowed or even reversed to a Democratic advantage in most polls by November 2006).

Now how hard was that?

UPDATE:  In the comments here, you can read about an erstwhile candidate's experiences with the Manly Rahm, who knew about Mark Foley in 2005 and apparently didn't do anything about it.  Also at MyDD.

UPDATE: Shakes read Lizza too.

Comments

[Scott Lemieux]

Hah, great stuff.

[DavidByron]

When Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Schumer set out to find candidates to run in the red states and districts of the 2006 electoral battleground they sought their own rural and exurban doppelgängers.

The odd thing is that the author of the piece appears to think that Tester and Webb were picked by those two instead of (in the case of Webb) beating the candidates he chose and running a "grass roots" campaign.

Out of 6 "manly men" in the picture two are Emanuel and Schumer and half the remainder (at least?) were not picked by them.

Looks like another story that wrote itself regardless of the facts. I guess it makes a break from (what I assume were) a host of stories about Pelosi being the first woman to hold America's top elected job? No?

ps. I thought that female candidates tended to do slightly better at winning votes, other things being equal, then men.

[Agi]

Clearly the Democrats did not win due to grass roots support for issues such as health care, education, Iraq, etc. They won on image alone! [end sarcasm]. I'm not sure if Lizza is trying to say that the American people are stupid or the Democrats are superficial empty heads.

a. Swearing and missing body parts are characteristics of a Manly Man.

As long as that body part is not the thing that determines one's biological manliness.

[eRobin]

And, of course, hair. Being a Manly Man is tricky business. You must be just right. Obama - no. Gore - don't be silly. Dean - Dean who? Any Republican - mais oui!

I think Lizza is trying to say that Chuck and Rahm are teh awesome and got the bright idea to use the Manly Man stuff as a hook. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this article was one of the worst things I've ever read in the NYT. Fallacious, tone-deaf, sexist on all fronts and poorly argued. It figures that it would come from a New Republic guy. Sadly, you can bet, b/c this is the NYT, that there will be follow-ups on the story from other outlets.